


Pursuit of Happiness

by zade



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extremis Tony Stark, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Nightmares, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy, Timeline What Timeline, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Still Has Arc Reactor, howard sucks okay, implied child neglect, tony rewrites his brain, uhh very loose extremis rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 07:51:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16058756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zade/pseuds/zade
Summary: He codes.  He fiddles with Extremis more than he should, like he told Pepper and Rhodey he wouldn’t.  He wants to make things better, make them right.  He wants to be happy again, somehow.  They agreed he would take time off from business, though, give him and Pepper time to heal into whatever they’re going to be next.  This is their cocoon stage; they might make it into a butterfly.He realizes fiddling with how his brain can interact with information while he’s upset is maybe not the smartest thing, but he’s pretty sure a straight brain-wifi connection is still smarter than drinking himself into temporary amnesia.  He’s a genius, after all, even if his self-preservation instincts wouldn’t be out of place on a lemming.--Tony uses extremis to try and make himself better. That is not what happens, at all.





	Pursuit of Happiness

**Author's Note:**

> this took me forever!!! have some warnings: tony drinks a little too much, there is implied neglect by his parents, tony has big mental health issues and fucks up his brain, ptsd, nightmares, tony viewing himself as a machine, me being upset about the loss of jarvis
> 
> my use of extremis is very loose because I don't entirely remember the movie canon or comics and I was too lazy to check. also I was stressing bc I had the armor under tony's skin instead of just the undersuit and then I realized I had just created the bleeding edge armor so anyway here's wonderwall
> 
> I uhh am aggressively team iron man, but I tried to be fair to everyone including Wanda which hurt me bc I Do Not like what they've done with her. this takes place at some point where things are okay, not great, bucky is there, and there was no civil war. or something. anyways, enjoy the thing please.
> 
> beta'd by [sunflashes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflashes/pseuds/sunflashes) who tried to get me to take out my commas but I REFUSED
> 
> the soundtrack to this fic was Pursuit of Happiness by Kid Cudi (a song which is VITAL to this fic), Migraine by Twenty One Pilots and Glitter and Gold by Barnes Courtney

It’s a rainy Tuesday in April when Tony realizes they aren’t going to reframe it. After Obie, after he comes home, after he makes a new better faster Arc Reactor, after he removes the prototype from his chest, he realizes it’s dented now, basically scrapped. It wouldn’t fit into the frame that Pepper had custom made, even if he wanted to put it back.

Instead, the frame sits empty on his desk. Proof that Tony Stark has a heart: none.

Pepper breaks up with him on a freezing day in November. She comes into the Penthouse, and he had remembered they had a date, is clean and dressed and when he sees her he wants to sweep her off her feet. She says, “Tony, we need to talk.” She says, “neglected,” and “cold,” and “lonely,” and “tired.”

She doesn’t say heartless, but she doesn’t really need to. Tony may not be good at people, but he can read between lines better than most.

The frame mocks him, but he doesn’t put it away. A monument to his loss, maybe. A monument to the time when he tried to pretend he could care.

He codes. He fiddles with Extremis more than he should, like he told Pepper and Rhodey he wouldn’t. He wants to make things better, make them right. He wants to be happy again, somehow. They agreed he would take time off from business, though, give him and Pepper time to heal into whatever they’re going to be next. This is their cocoon stage; they might make it into a butterfly.

He realizes fiddling with how his brain can interact with information while he’s upset is maybe not the smartest thing, but he’s pretty sure a straight brain-wifi connection is still smarter than drinking himself into temporary amnesia. He’s a genius, after all, even if his self-preservation instincts wouldn’t be out of place on a lemming.

He dreams. A robot of his own design splits his skin and pulls open the cage of his ribs, bearing a shriveled raisin of a heart, or nothing, a void, and replaces it with a mechanical one. It ticks like a clock. It is still not a heart.

He wakes with the ticking still echoing in his brain. It’s Pepper’s watch, still sitting on the nightstand where she had left it weeks ago, before she left him. Maybe it was a sign; you are running out of time, Tony.

He shuffles to an Avengers meeting, all smiles and bravado and empty spaces where he used to think he could love. Steve talks, Steve plans, only a little bitter. Tony is better at plans, but Steve is better at drills, so he lets it go. It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care. He plays chess with FRIDAY in his mind, something he is almost certain he should not be using Extremis to do, but he does. Tony has a scab on his arm, a cut from the last mission—too shallow for stitches, but long and thick, healing faster than it ought to. He picks at it absently, half paying attention to Steve, half lost in circuitry.

He wonders, distracted, if he still bleeds blood or motor oil. The armor itches below his skin—not really there, in that manner, but the thought of it is chilling or comforting or cold. Unprompted, his brain provides him with an image of him slicing open his own chest with a scalpel to watch his heart beat. He’s mixing metaphors and reality, he knows, but he was always bad at figurative language. Coding is easy, words are hard.

Proof that Tony Stark has a heart.

“…did you hear me?” Steve looks at him with a combo of bemusement and irritation and pity. Once it would have rankled. Tony can’t muster the anger though, can’t find the place he usually leaves it.

“Roger Rogers, aye aye, Cap, etc. etc., and so on and so forth.” He didn’t, but that’s what JARVIS is for. No, FRIDAY. That’s what FRIDAY is for. She offers to relay it to him right then, silently, but he declines. He doesn’t care what Steve was talking about, really.

He’s pretty sure he cried, after Ultron, when he realized JARVIS was gone for good and that Vision wanted nothing to do with him. He remembers it in third person, like he was watching his body from outside of it. He tries to recapture the feeling, the all-encompassing blanket of loss, the loss of a child, no less, but he can’t grasp it; like water slipping through a sieve.

The meeting has apparently ended. Everyone has vacated but Tony and Natasha, who is watching him with a look of intense study, like she’s going to be tested on him. “Pepper?” she asks, like a punch to the balls.

He wants to say yes, because it’s easy. “I think I’m going to quit the Avengers,” he says instead, and her eyes widen minutely, a micro-expression, but he’s learned her enough to read the shock there.

“Why?”

He thinks about the last villain they captured. A kid, really, traumatized and dangerously smart and scared. He didn’t feel the sort of triumphant righteousness that Steve so clearly feels, wasn’t torn between feeling for the kid and wanting to condemn him. He didn’t care. Couldn’t care. He should have stepped in, made sure the kid got help instead of prison, advocated for a kid who could have easily been him if Howard had let him have enough free will to turn darkside.

Instead he had gone home, watched porn, and gone to sleep. He hadn’t managed to feel bad about that, yet.

“I’m tired.”

He is tired. He’s tired of trying to care, making himself act. He’s tired of trying to retrain his thought processes to follow the way others think. Obie was right, Howard was right, Ty—fucking Ty—was right; he only good for one thing. Weapons are easy. Morals are hard.

Natasha breaks her leg on the next mission. He forgets to visit her in the Med Wing. It doesn’t matter, he reasons, when both Steve and Bruce level a look of deep disappointment at him. They’re teammates, not friends. Casualties happen in wars.

FunVee, he thinks, and HumDrumVee, and starts laughing. It was a clever joke. Casualties happen. He’s felt guilty for so long, and still, he can feel it simmering below the surface, but on his face lies a thick layer of indifference.

She’s not even dead, so. He wonders if he would feel differently if she was.

It’s snowy Wednesday night, sloppy with wet sleet and grey slush, when Tony relapses. He’s been careful with alcohol since becoming a superhero. He still drinks, sure, but one drink here, two there. Not the sort of bingeing-blackout drinking that he’d become infamous for.

There’s a bottle of scotch he’s been eyeing for a week, and he’s almost halfway through it when he realizes through the haze of alcohol that something is wrong.

He calls Rhodey with his brain phone, but doesn’t leave a message. He doesn’t really have anything to say, anyway.

He wakes up in the hospital on Thursday, Rhodey’s hand clenching his tight and the taste of charcoal on his tongue. Rhodey’s eyes are wet and Tony’s pretty sure that used to mean something to him.

Rhodey tells him that someone drugged the scotch, that they caught the culprit, a staff member in his own household, that he had been watching Tony’s intake and had drugged it with the amount that would knock him out after one glass.

Tony’s pretty sure he had had six or seven or eight.

“I thought you were quitting this shit,” Rhodey says, disapproval evident in his voice.

“Hashtag same,” Tony says, because he doesn’t want to talk. 

“Tony—”

Tony interrupts. “I was just drugged. Let me sleep.” He thinks Rhodey wants to argue, but he’s out before he can.

He dreams. His veins move sluggishly with motor oil and his body responds with a rusty staccato-ness. He glances up, suddenly in his mother’s bedroom. He sits down roughly at her vanity. In the mirror, he is made up of wires and blue arcing electricity. Maria’s voice, like calling through a tunnel. “Where is my little monster? Where could he be?”

He wakes up with his heart racing in his ears. He can’t remember his mother ever calling him a monster, but then again, he can’t remember her ever calling him anything.

Rhodey is still there, sleeping in the white plastic chair by his hospital bed. He wonders when Rhodey will have to go back to his military masters. He hopes it’ll happen quickly. He’s not sure he cares enough to fake smiling for that long.

He used to be so good at smiling.

Barnes comes to him the day before Easter. His arm is spasming periodically—not a problem, yet, but clearly on its way to becoming one. Barnes’ face is pinched, tight with anxiety, possibly pain. Barnes’ arm, of course, has no respect for Tony’s business, for his deadlines, for the work he has to finish.

“Can this wait?” Tony asks, hands moving even as he stares Barnes down. He doesn’t need his eyes to work, he knows basic repulsor technology blind.

Barnes takes a long pause, long enough for Tony to begin to think he’ll leave. When he finally speaks he says, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Tony rolls his eyes, but puts the tech down, retrieving a screwdriver from his back pocket. He is familiar with the arm. Barnes refuses to let him replace it, but it needs more than a little maintenance. He deftly opens the correct panel, ignoring Barnes’ slight jump at the sensation and pops the power source out.

They’ve faced this problem before, to a lesser degree. Tony usually sits him down, banters, works around the easy fix, but not today. He doesn’t have the time or the energy.

The arm goes dead and the fear in Barnes’ face almost makes Tony feel something, but then it’s gone. Barnes is shaking, clammy sweat clinging suddenly to his brow. Tony pushes the battery back into place and Barnes starts, startled. It was cruel, maybe, but efficient.

“All done. Get out.”

Barnes flees. Tony can’t blame him.

He can’t sleep with aggravating frequency. He fucked his way to sleep for most of his life, but he can’t be bothered to find someone willing to spread their legs for him, and the appeal of it seems fleeting at best.

He thinks, instead. Plans become vague circuitry becomes vines becomes plants becomes germs becomes viral warfare becomes the end, boom. He thinks about nature, how there isn’t really cruelty or kindness in nature, just survival.

He thinks about viruses, how they adapt to survive, how they change and infect and kill and continue and how they can’t be considered alive. He thinks about the article Bruce showed him, using viruses to remove and replace faulty pieces of DNA from a sequence, how they can tamed and trained to be helpful instead of destructive, but it’s not because they are kind.

Tony is pretty sure one day he’ll self-destruct. He thinks about the biggest bomb he could create. He could shower the world in radiation, make the sky go gray for years. He could. There’s no reason not to, really.

He is like a virus. He isn’t cruel or kind, he is just destructive. He thought he could be tamed, but he was wrong.

He sleeps.

Clint wakes him up, jumping from the ceiling vent onto his legs, with a bottle of cheap tequila.

“Nat said you were breaking up with us,” Clint says, rolling off of Tony.

Tony thinks about how close to the surface his armor was, how easily he could have killed Clint, could still kill him. “Aw, Legolas, I didn’t know you felt that way.”

Clint removes the cork top with his teeth, and brandishes it proudly in a wide smile. “Baby, you know you’re my one and only.”

Tony rolls his eyes, ignoring the pang in his chest. It would be a dig, if they were friends or enemies or frenemies, but they’re not, they are coworkers, which means it was a stupid comment. He takes the tequila and after one sip uses Extremis to turn his taste buds off. It’s strange, feeling the liquid in his mouth, burning, but tasteless. It’s better than Clint’s taste in tequila, though.

He’s known enough people over the years to know he’s being buttered up. “You don’t have to worry, you know. I won’t take away my funding or the tower or anything. You’ll still have a place to live and train etcetera.”

Clint smacks him on the arm when he takes the tequila back. Tony can’t feel it. “Idiot. I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about my friend.”

Tony’s hand goes automatically to the arc reactor in his chest. His intention had been to use Extremis to grow him a new heart, to heal the damage the shrapnel had done. The doctors worried the damage was too great for Extremis to fix. Besides, no one was looking at his naked chest anymore. There was no reason to bother. No reason to care.

Tony smiles a wide, fake smile. “Me? Nah, you’ve got nothing to worry about, Robin Hood. I’m good. I’m just worn out, you know? Three jobs would get anyone down, not to mention my side jobs of being brilliant and very sexy.”

Clint eyes him warily as he passes the tequila back to him. “If you’re sure,” he says, just as doubtfully.

Tony thinks he could probably speed up the process by which his body broke alcohol down. He’ll try to figure out the biological coding for that later. He takes another sip.

He doesn’t see the witch or Falcon all that much. Falcon he has nothing against, Sam is fine, if a little too far up Cap’s ass, but Wanda he avoids like the plague. At first, it was out of fear, out of the way his chest tightened, like it was trying to crash in on itself and how his breaths got fast and useless.

Now it’s about the knowledge that if she comes near him again, he’ll kill her. He sees her once after everything, in the kitchen, using his fucking coffee pot. She doesn’t even say anything, just raises an eyebrow and begins to open her mouth, and his gauntlet has already unfolded on his skin, repulsor hot and aimed at her head, a pointblank shot.

Cap yells something, but Tony’s pulse is pounding so hard in his head that it’s almost enough to convince him his heart is real and beating.

Vision interrupts the altercation in progress, says, “Mr. Stark,” in JARVIS’ voice with so much distance that Tony blanches, nearly pukes. He wants to leave, needs to leave this very second, but his legs aren’t responding, like he’s in full armor and out of juice.

Someone manhandles him out the of the kitchen, and he only doesn’t blow them up because of how suddenly shaky he’s become. It takes forever to come back to himself. FRIDAY is in his head, counting his breaths and telling him it’s okay in the slightly panicked way he remembers trying to comfort Howard when he was too far gone to the bottle.

His heart is beating so hard it might burst, and here it is; here is the sorrow, the horror, the bone shaking loss; here is the memory of sitting on the floor of his dorm room, high and vibrating and bone tired; of saying “Hello, JARVIS,” for the first time, and JARVIS saying hello back.

The grief is overpowering and he thinks he might crumble under the weight.  
Falcon presses a hand on his shoulder and brings him back to the present like a face full of cold water in a familiar cave. “Panic attacks?” he asks. “A lot of vets get them.”

They’re sitting on the couch, and Tony has no idea how he got there, which was a familiar experience in college but not as much as a real adult. “Not a vet,” he says, tightly.

“Superheroes go through a lot of the same shit,” Falcon says. “POW’s, too.”

No one has ever called Tony a POW to his face and he wants to want to scream, but really he wants to go to bed. He resolves to look up panic attacks, figure out all the intricacies, what his body is doing and why, and then delete them from his programming.

“Can’t have been easy, flying into space like that,” Falcon says, blunt and inquisitive.

Tony wants to laugh. Like it was his impromptu space trip that broke the proverbial camel’s back, like he didn’t build himself a portable fortress after Afghanistan. “Can’t be easy, sucking up to Cap like that.”

Falcon grins, an easy open grin. He is easily the most well adjusted of the Avengers. “Want to go for a fly?” he asks.

“Is it exhausting, dealing with traumatized idiots on the clock and off it?” It’s insensitive, the kind of thing he would have once carefully thought about before saying. He probably would have still said it, but there would have been intent, instead of a lack.

Sam considers him for a long moment. “I like helping people.” Like that’s enough, like that explains anything. “Let’s go for a fly.”

Tony agrees, if only so they don’t have to talk more.

It’s good, being in the air without an emergency. Sam flies in loop-de-loops, laughing and taunting Tony, in that friendly sort of way that Rhodey talks to him, and no one else has in his entire life. The thought makes him pull into a nosedive, and Falcon is copying him, going along for the ride, and Tony thinks, this is it I can crash I can stop this is it this is it this is it, but pulls up at the last second.

He can hear Steve in his head, berating him for pulling another stupid stunt, but Falcon whoops, pulling up a hair after Tony, wings slightly less responsive.

“Your response time is a little off,” Tony tells him once they’ve landed. “I’ll fix that for you.” He tried to figure out where he can fit that into his schedule, and immediately regrets offering. It’s his job, he knows, but he doesn’t really care, and unless he stops sleeping, his calendar is too full.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sam—no, Falcon—says. “I know my limits and I work around them. You’ve got enough on your plate.”

Tony decides to program out the need to sleep.

It’s a sunny summer day when Bucky corners him in the gym. Not sleeping has made Tony feel restless, and pushing his slightly enhanced muscles helps get rid of the itchiness beneath his skin. He’s bench pressing a fuck ton of weight, but if his arms get tired, maybe they’ll stop shaking.

“What’s with you?” Bucky says, a hint of Brooklyn on his tongue.

“Nothing,” Tony says, and feels nothing. “How’re things with you and Cap?”

“Hard,” Bucky answers truthfully. “He wants us to be two guys we’re not anymore.” Tony bets that them sharing a set of rooms isn’t helping either, but it’s their choice, and their mistake to make.

Tony wants to shake him, wants to laugh, wants to say, “good, things should be hard for Steve for once,” which isn’t fair and he knows it isn’t. Steve has had a hard life, and Tony recognizes that, he just wishes someone would recognize that Tony’s had a hard life, too.

“Despite all that, I love the guy,” Bucky says, and smiles. Bucky grabs the bar when Tony lifts it, helps slot it into the stand, even though Tony wasn’t anywhere near done. “How you doing, Tony, really?”

Tony slides out from under the weight. Anger used to be so close to the surface of his skin, a second kind of armor, but it’s so hard to load that program, now. He’d say he was tired, but he can’t feel tiredness anymore. He just feels done. “Like an asshole just interrupted my gym routine.”

Bucky laughs, like it’s a joke. Like they’re friends. Maybe they are, to him. “Bulk up much more, you won’t fit in your fancy designer suits.”

“I’ll buy new ones,” Tony says, dismissively, beginning to stretch his arms out.

“And when you chase all your friends off?”

Tony snorts. “I’ll buy new ones of those, too.” Bucky’s mirth has turned to cold consideration. “What do you want, Barnes?”

“I’d like to take you up on the new arm,” he says. “And I’d like it we could getta know each other a little more. I know the rest of the team twice as well as I know you, and I let you play with the arm.” He waggles a finger at Tony. “That’s usually third date material, minimum.”

It’s a funny enough joke, but Tony can’t find the place where he stores laughter. He thinks, joylessly, mirth.exe. “Fine,” Tony says. He built a new arm ages ago, and it’s been sitting gathering dust in his lab. Or it would be, if his lab wasn’t designed purposefully to keep from getting dusty, so he never actually had to clean it. “Swing by later, we’ll fix you up, make you look nice for prom.”

“Not as nice as you in one of your suits,” Bucky says, and winks. He’s pretty sure it’s joking and not flirtatious, but either way.

Tony wishes that made him feel anything.

Bucky becomes a fixture in his lab. Tony isn’t sure how it happens, and he likes it, a little, but mostly he doesn’t think about it one way or the other. It’s sort of nice to have someone around, with Rhodey still overseas. Bucky doesn’t know much about mechanics or coding, but he tries to be helpful.

It makes the part of Tony that still feels things like that ache for his absent friend.

Steve trailed after him the first few times, but after Bucky had claimed that he wanted to commune with his brethren, and then had spent two hours playing catch with DUM-E, Steve had left, which was good. Steve makes Tony’s chest feel tight.

Bucky, though, Bucky is like of his bots, or like FRIDAY. He is thrown, several times, when he realizes he can’t speak to Bucky with his mind. He can text him with it, though, and Bucky is very good at texting back quickly, even if he’s a memelord and asshole about it. Sam’s like that, too, though. Somehow, between the two of them and Rhodey, Tony has ended up with a close contacts list full of sarcastic assholes who seem reluctant to give up on him.

He doesn’t dream much, not anymore. Instead he spends his nights building and crafting and planning. Sometimes, he has dreams while he’s awake, or maybe hallucinations, of his veins being replaced with tubing, his joints remade with metal, silicon pads to keep them from rubbing. Stark men are made of iron, Howard had said, drink in hand. Tony takes a sip of cognac and imagines that it’s true.

Pepper comes to see him. They haven’t seen each other in maybe six months, he’s lost track. She looks radiant and powerful as her heels click on the floors. “Tony,” she says, smiling cautiously. “Have you been taking care of yourself?” Her tone implies doubt, which have made him upset six months ago, or maybe even two, but now he just shrugs.

His body has never run better, everything optimized. This is the best it has ever been cared for. “You look great,” he says instead, and doesn’t sound interested or wistful or sad.

His lack of tone seems to puzzle her, but her brows smooth consciously a moment later. “The Maria Stark Foundation has to pick its next beneficiaries in three weeks. I sent you the files, but you haven’t gotten back to me.”

“Don’t care,” Tony says, turning away from her. If that’s all she’s here for, then fixing Natasha’s Widow’s Bites takes priority. “You pick this time.”

“Tony,” she says, and her voice wobbles dangerously. “You always pick. You said it was important to you to pick.”

He says, “It was, and now it’s not.” He doesn’t say, “you said I was important to you,” but it’s a near thing. He wants to delete those thoughts from his mind, and then realizes he can. He pulls up his sandbox, and begins coding with his head while his hands still fuss with the Bites. He has more bandwidth now than ever, more processing power, and his multitasking has never been better. There isn’t room for the upgrades he wants to make, so he deletes something in his mind without checking to see what it was.

Pepper frowns, leaning over him to where his coding is displayed on a holoscreen. “What is that?”

“Upgrades,” Tony says, tightly, wanting her gone acutely. It hurts in a way he thought he had stopped hurting, wants to stop hurting.

“For what?”

Tony sighs. “Confidential. Just pick an organization, I’ll see if I can go to the Gala, but no promises.”

Her frown deepens, but she listens when FRIDAY asks her politely to leave, claiming Tony has a phone conference. She says, “Is that all, Mr. Stark?” angling a hopeful smile at him, and he doesn’t even realize he has a set response he missed until she’s been gone for twenty minutes. He feels a little bad that FRIDAY lied for him, but FRIDAY loves him and hasn’t quite learned that “doing what’s best for Tony” is not the same as “listening to what Tony says.”

JARVIS wouldn’t have let Tony reprogram himself to begin with.

It’s better, though, in a lot of ways. He saves lives, he avoids conflict, he gets more done than ever. He’s cold and calculating, and Steve is all over his ass about his risks and prioritizing numbers over every individual person, but they can’t save them all, and he’s not exactly wrong, now is he? The hollow feeling in his chest is right; he doesn’t have a heart, why should he have to act like he does? 

He works like a machine. More and more often he looks at himself and is confused to find skin. He catches and Bucky and Nat between microexpressions, looking at him with barely palatable concern. There is no need for concern. He’s fine.

Sometimes, the arc reactor is like a solid, burning weight in his chest, making his ribs ache and every inhalation feel like he’s breathing in fire, and he thinks about turning his pain sensors off.

Steve comes to his lab a warm evening in July. New York smells like hot trash, and Tony struggles, every time they leave the tower, to want to help people. “Hey, Tony. Can we talk?”

Tony’s not sure when he moved from Stark to Tony. “Sure. What’s up, Capsicle?”

Steve huffs, expression falling into the disappointed way it gets when he’s wasted time expecting something from Tony. Tony sees that one a lot. “I was wondering if you were planning on coming up for dinner. It’s Clint’s birthday.” Steve hesitates, then says, cajoling, “You haven’t been to any of the others. You could change that.”

“Extrapolating from past experiences would tell you: no,” Tony says, manipulating a holoscreen with deft fingers. They lag behind his mind, but he’s always been a more hands on kind of guy.

Steve sighs, shifting from one hip to the other. “Are you even eating?” he sounds irritable, but the twitch at his lips shows concern. “I don’t think I’ve seen you in the kitchen in months.”

Tony hasn’t gone up to the kitchen since his last encounter with the witch. He has groceries shipped to lab. He reaches over and grabs his metal cup filled with smoothie, taking a pointed sip in Steve’s direction. “Smoothie.”

“You need protein,” Steve says, stubbornly.

“Protein powder,” Tony explains, turning back to the holoscreen. “In the smoothie.”

Steve sighs, shaking his head. When Tony glances back at him, his expression is a little sadder, a little lost. “Do you enjoy having that many smoothies?”

No, he doesn’t, and that’s sort of the point. “I did a lot of calculations, and I’m getting all my nutrients etcetera, and it’s fast and portable. I’m fine.”

“We worry about you, Tony,” Steve says morosely. Colleagues, not friends.

It’s what they get, Tony thinks, for wasting their time on him.

It occurs to him then, for the first time, that maybe this is all some form of perverse punishment, and he’s intentionally hurting himself, not helping. He pulls up his coding, his upgrades, and scans them. He should delete it, maybe, do a factory reset on himself. He thinks about it. He doesn’t. He doesn’t.

It’s better, not caring about the Avengers or the world or himself. It’s an improvement, for everyone involved. The tiny part of him that still craves things wants variety, wants to be happy, but the vast majority of him is relieved the weight of guilt and feeling and expectations is gone from his shoulders.

Sam comes to him early August. “Are you okay?” he asks, leaning on a metal table in Tony’s lab. His arms are crossed across his chest, muscular and strong. He’s bulkier than Tony could ever hope to be, and analytically, Tony knows that makes him a threat. More than that, his prodding makes him one.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” His smile is calculated; a little sarcastic, a little self-deprecating, mostly charming: a Tony Stark Classic.

“I don’t know, man, you tell me. I feel like I’m watching you shut down.”

It’s comically inaccurate. Between the arc reactor powering his body, and extremis to build and rebuild and maintain, he could live for centuries. Might. An almost infinitesimal part of him expresses worry, what he would become if he let himself live that long.

He’s a virus. Maybe he’d remake the human race in his image.

Tony rolls his eyes. “I’m fine.”

Sam is still watching him with that careful, evaluating gaze. He’d give the Russian spy twins a run for their money. “Bucky says you don’t sleep.”

Bucky, who is sitting on the cot in the back corner, attempting to get a handle on soldering, ducks his head.

“Barnes should learn to mind his own fucking business before his lab access is revoked.”

He can see the dismayed look on Bucky’s face in his mind’s eye, through the camera that FRIDAY is relaying to him. “Tony,” he starts, but then stops himself, which is good. Tony’s not really interested in any of this conversation, and the faster it wraps up, the better.

“I know people, if you want to talk to someone. People who have nothing to with the Avengers or SHIELD.” Sam sighs, arms coming settling loosely at his sides. “Isolating yourself from your friends isn’t going to help.”

“Let’s test your theory,” he says, and relays his plan to FRIDAY.

“The Boss asks that you please vacate the lab,” she says, only a little apologetically.

Sam sighs again, but puts his hands up in surrender. “I’m going, but know that it’s not what I’d like to do.” He leaves quietly, but he’s shaking his head and it gets to Tony for some reason he can’t define.

Bucky stays put, though. “Sorry I talked to Sam,” he says instead of leaving. “But I thought he’d be better set to help. He does that stuff normally, and me, I can’t even remember to speak English half the time.”

It’s way less than half the time, and he started getting better way faster when he realized how Tony reacted to Arabic, to Urdu, to Dari and Pashto and Mongolian and Farsi and Russian. He didn’t have panic attacks, not anymore, he’d taken care of that, but his triggers still made him feel like there were live wires underneath his skin.

Sometimes when he looked hard he could see them moving.

“I’m fine.”

Bucky doesn’t push. He smiles cautiously, like he thinks Tony might still kick him out. “Teach me more about coding.”

Teaching Bucky coding is like teaching JARVIS was. He’s smart and sarcastic, and learns quick, so it feels more like sharing than teaching. He feels a twinge every time they begin, and resolves to debug himself later. 

He teaches.

It’s early fall and the leaves have started rotting on the branches when Rhodey tells him he’s coming back full time.

“They got me doing Avengers work for a while,” Rhodey said on the vidphone in Tony’s head. “I’m on loan, so it’s not forever, but I’ll be in New York for a couple months at least.”

It doesn’t matter.

The next day, he slips and burns his leg with a blowtorch. The skin scorches black, and smells like his chest did with a car battery running his heart. His mind goes blank, and the thoughts run in circles: burn, car battery, cave, I’m going to die, burn, car battery, cave, and on and on. He thinks of himself like a car, replacing bits and pieces to run better, wondering if he’s replaced too many pieces and turned a car into the quinjet.

“Jesus, Tony,” Rhodey says, waking him from his fugue. There’s shock on Rhodey’s face, which is a little unnecessary; Tony can barely feel it.

Less people would talk to him, he thinks, if he was actually a car. Tony forces a smile. “Platypus, you’re home early!”

“Tony, your leg!” Rhodey guides his hands, sets down the blow torch and then pushes Tony onto the bench. Tony tries to stand back up, but Rhodey has his serious face on, and a lifetime of that look has taught Tony he won’t win this fight. Rhodey crouches down and looks at the burn. “I think we need to take you to the hospital.”

“No,” Tony says, and talks over Rhodey’s attempts to interrupt him. “I heal fast, this is fine.”

Rhodey’s eyes are wide and he’s shaking his head so sadly. Tony’s stomach sinks, which is not something he has felt in ages. “No, you’re not fine. You are so far from fine.”

“Racism. Against cyborgs. Is what that is.” Tony tries to stand up, but Rhodey is still squatting in front of him and Tony can’t stand towering over him, so he sits back down. “I’m healthier than ever, honeybear, really. I don’t even get panic attacks anymore.”

Rhodey squares his jaw, looking every bit the Iron Patriot. “No, instead when you get triggered, you get all vacant eyed and stare silently at the wall until someone snaps you out of it.”

That is absolutely not what happens, Tony is like 80% sure. He couldn’t have coded it that wrong could he? Have left a void for his reaction? He’s better than that. He forces a laugh, but it doesn’t sound natural, it sounds like gears scraping together and he barely resists pressing a hand to his throat to make sure his vocal cords are still there. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“I just saw it,” Rhodes counters. “Plus FRIDAY sent me video footage, and Barnes sent me your ‘upgrade’ files.”

Tony balks at that. “In no possible universe. My person files are extremely encrypted and—”

“And you taught and ex-Hydra asset how to code and hack. What exactly did you expect?”

Tony isn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this. Something must be glitching, he shouldn’t feel this deep set feeling of betrayal that blankets his bones. What’s there to betray? He doesn’t care, he doesn’t. “It doesn’t matter, none of it matters.”

“Yes it does,” Rhodey says, standing, and putting Tony in his shadow. “It matters because you matter, and you’ve fucked around in your brain so much you can’t feel things.”

“I couldn’t have—I wasn’t trying to,” Tony says, and he wasn’t. He just wants to be happy. Sure, he messed around with things, and sure parts of him had to be deleted to make room for the new, better, cooler stuff, but that was just basic hard drive management. He’d have known if he wrote over anything vital.

Rhodey, who has understood Tony better than himself for the vast part of Tony’s life sighs. “Getting rid of your ability to feel sadness doesn’t make you happy, Tony, it just makes a void.”

Tony shakes his head. He’s sure he’s right. His hands are shaking and he hasn’t had time to exercise in a few days. He presses one to arc reactor and tries to calm the tremor. He feels almost panicky, which is impossible. He got rid of that reaction from his body’s lexicon. “It’s better this way. It is. No one cares about me, and I don’t have to care about other people and fail. It’s better.”

Rhodey’s face turns pained, a look that Tony can remember hating. “I care about you, you dumb fucker. I love you, Tones.”

Tony nods. He’s sure Rhodey loved him at some point, but the person he is now is so far gone from that person, it’s hardly fair they share a name. He can feel himself sinking down into his mind, because there are signals coming at him that he cannot comprehend. His OS is stalled.

“No, don’t do that,” Rhodey says, and puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder.

Tony’s leg throbs. When he looks at Rhodey’s face, he sees the seriousness, the honesty, but something else, something he’s sort of shocked he missed for this long. He’s better at expressions, now, without his own subjective filter, but even so. Rhodey couldn’t—shouldn’t—no. He shakes his head, the tremors getting worse.

It’s one of those long standing realities of Tony’s life; Tony is in love with his best friend, and it is not reciprocated. He hasn’t even imagined a “what if” scenario where Rhodey loves him back in ages. Karmically, Pepper was the only good thing he had coming. It was impossible to even fantasize about another good thing.

“How long?” Tony demands, coming apart at the seams. He stands, puts the bench between them, a barrier keeping him from thinking too hard. “Recently? Context. I need context. Since college?”

Rhodey recoils like he was hit, shuddering. “Jesus, no! Tony, you were fourteen.”

He remembers it, too. He had been fourteen and itching to prove himself, and when a gaggle seniors had invited him to a party he hadn’t even thought for a second it could be anything but an honest offer. Rhodey had found him, three hours later, drunk and scared and alone, and he had scared the seniors off.

The newspapers had said that Tony Stark had agreed to take over Stark Industries after his father died, but the truth was that he had agreed the second that Rhodey had signed up for the military. He didn’t want to build weapons, but he would do anything to keep Rhodey safe.

His feelings for Rhodey had been there so long it was like a permanent injury; eventually you learned to work around it.

“But you do…” Tony trailed off, hoping that Rhodey would rescue him, like he always did.

“I don’t think now’s the time to have this conversation.”

Tony’s leg is throbbing insistently, and an itch burns below the surface of his skin. “What’s wrong with now?”

He can’t read the expression on Rhodey’s face. It’s somewhere between sad and puzzled, and Tony can’t figure out why. “Tony,” Rhodey says after a long moment of looking at him sadly. “You tell me.”

Tony’s brain shuffles through the information he has, organized and precise and lightning fast, trying to figure out what’s striking Rhodey as wrong. The situation, the location, Rhodey’s implied feelings, his facial and expressions and tics, Tony’s feelings—oh.

In the spot where Tony’s feelings for Rhodey have lived since he was sixteen there’s—nothing. There’s nothing. He knows, intellectually, that he’s in love with Rhodey, but the information could have come from a book. He can’t feel it, and it’s been with him so long it’s absence is like the absence of a limb. He doesn’t have a heart.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t.

Here it is, definitive proof: Tony Stark doesn’t have a heart.

He thinks he should laugh, or cry, but there’s just a yawning void, and underneath it, distantly, the faint headlights of panic. He must have fallen, because he’s on the ground and Rhodey is in front of him, kneeling over him, saying, “It’s okay, Tony, we can fix this, it’s okay.”

It doesn’t feel okay, it doesn’t feel like anything. How could this have happened? He looks Rhodey in the eyes and makes a decision. He sticks a metaphorical paperclip into his brain and resets.

The feelings rush back into him like a whirlwind. Anger, at Rhodey for keeping this from him, then at Bucky and Sam’s scheming, at Wanda, at himself, at Pepper; then sadness for JARVIS and Vision and himself and Bucky; and on, and on. He’s crying and laughing, and Rhodey is holding him tight, holding him together like solder, and Tony is falling apart.

He sleeps three days straight. He dreams. The arc reactor burns within his chest, like Paladium poisoning, but worse. He claws at it, skin giving way like gauze, until he’s blinded by the bright blue light, and in it’s glow he can see the veins in his skin harden and turn to metal. He tries to scream but there’s iron in his throat, and Howard’s voice in his ears, “Don’t cry, men don’t cry, Stark men don’t cry,” and he doesn’t cry.

It isn’t better. In his first, cold, autumn day awake, Tony has three panic attacks, one in front of the assembled Avengers and he tries, in fits and starts, to explain the last almost-year of his life. It would be bad enough if it was just his colleagues (maybe, maybe his friends), but it’s Wanda, and it’s Rhodey, and he sort of wants to die as much as he ever has (and Wanda, Wanda spends the whole meeting looking at him like she’s never seen him before, and if she never saw him again it wouldn’t be so bad).

His emotions come lightning quick. Cap handing him a bottle of water when his throat closes up brings him to tears, and Clint elbowing him affectionately brings on Bruce-like rage (but Sam smiling at him makes him so happy his cheeks ache from the smile and Rhodey—Rhodey brings up too many emotions to count).

He tries bringing it up to Rhodey, the feelings, the possible mutual feelings, and Rhodey says things like, “Concentrate on getting better first,” which leave Tony cold and colder, day by day.

Tony’s emotions come back, but some of the other stuff doesn’t leave. He has trouble viewing himself as a person, he realizes, after he lets himself get hurt instead of his fellow Avengers three times in a row. It’s not heroism, so much as it’s I-Can-Be-Repaired, or I-Don’t-Really-Matter, or I’m-Barely-Real. 

He takes Sam up on his referral to a therapist, which both Bucky and Rhodey assure him is a good move, but it’s hard to go, to talk about his mistakes and shortcomings, and it feels nothing but bad, right up until he’s able to breathe his way out of panic attack all on his own.

With Bucky and Rhodey looking over his shoulder, Tony adds a couple useful upgrades back in. The brain-wifi was too good to pass up, and he can’t live without being able to talk to his bots after having experienced it. Little things. Things that make it easier that everyday Rhodey seems move further and further away from him.

He can’t stay mad if Rhodey played him to save his life, but he thinks he still has the right to a little anger right now.

Tony braintexts his Sam and Bucky group chat (named Falcon Punch, a decision which he stands by), “he’s doing it again,” when Rhodey blows him off to train with Steve.

Sam texts back, “You’re reading too much into it. Just ask the man on a date.”

Bucky texts, “ys pls do, clint bet me 50$ u wldnt,” and Tony deeply regrets letting Bucky have a phone.

Tony thinks it’s more than that. Rhodey’s seen how bad it can get with Tony, and now he’s changing his mind, and he can’t really blame Rhodey for that. He needs a distraction, so he goes to the lab and tries to redo his calendar so that any of it is possible while still getting three-to-twelve hours of sleep. He’s almost convinced himself to focus on building a time machine, when FRIDAY interrupts him.

“Boss, you have a caller,” she says, sends him the video feed of the doorway, where Wanda is standing, fingers tangling in her skirt.

Tony has to take several slow breaths before he feels okay to open the door. He’s on a the verge of a panic attack, but he’s holding it at bay, at least for now.

She walks in slowly, giving the lab an appraising look that makes Tony itch. “Stark,” she says.

He’s proud his voice only warbles a little when says, “Tony, please.”

She wasn’t expecting that, and her eyes widen a little. “Tony, then. Captain Rogers suggested it was time I had better armor, and as you outfit the team…” she trails off, her confidence faltering for a second.

She looks young, and for the first time in ages, he remembers just how young she is. He’s terrified of her, but she seems terrified of everything. “I can do that. Color preferences?”

She offers him a half a smile. “Red.”

Tony laughs, half forced, and nods. “Okay. Red armor. You got it. Anything else?”

She hesitates, presumably done with Cap’s errand and still here of her own volition. Tony can’t keep looking at her, so he opens a new project and begins piecing together her armor with his fingers and mind simultaneously.

“Can I stay and watch you?” she asks softly, sounding as though she’s already heard him say no.

He needs just as much as exposure to her as she does to him, if they’re going to work together. He nods, stiffly, and she slips silently onto the bench closest to him. As he makes changes, she begins making comments and asking questions. His answers become less and less reluctant as time goes on, until he’s explaining the difference between knife-proof and bullet-proof materials, and his own materials that do both.

“You’re not what I expected,” she says, when she finally gets up to leave, more than an hour later.

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” Tony responds, sending the prototype for digital testing, to make sure it will work like it should.

“Do.”

She passes Rhodey outside the clear glass door. The glass closes and he waits a millisecond too long to ask FRIDAY to send him the audio, so all he can do is watch Wanda’s lips move, and Rhodey nod quizzically.

Rhodey walks in, puzzlement still slapped on his face, and it’s only because Tony is feeling alive and accomplished so he intercedes before Rhodey can get a word in edgewise. “Skittles, why are you avoiding me, your buddy, and all around rich and talented friend?”

Rhodey’s puzzled expression deepens. “Skittles? That’s a new one.”

Tony shrugs. “Trying it on for size.”

Rhodey sighs, but he’s smiling through his attempts to frown. “Well, I suppose anything is better than platypus.”

“You wound me!” Tony cries, spinning in his chair to face Rhodey for real. “And you’re avoiding the question. Which really, I’m the king of avoidance, I’m not sure why you thought you could hide that from me.”

Rhodey chuckles, shakes his head. “I missed you,” he says, and Tony’s heart thumps loudly in his chest. “You were missing your Tony-ness. I’m glad to see it’s back.”

Tony gives him a moment to say something else, something on subject, but he doesn’t, so Tony soldiers on. It’s the one thing he’s really good at. “Look, if you didn’t mean what you implied, just let me know, okay, James? I’m a big boy, I can take it.”

Rhodey blinks at him, startled. “First name, huh? I must be in trouble.” He sighs, steps forward, so he’s only a step away from Tony’s space. “You’ve got a lot going on right now. I get that my admission had something to do with your reset, and I’m grateful for it, really. I was prepared to keep talking until you saw sense, and I wasn’t expecting it to be that simple. But just because you know, doesn’t mean anything has to change. I’m not going to make a move on you, or anything.”

“I’ve been in love with you since I was sixteen,” Tony blurts, then scowls at himself. “You know, passively.”

Rhodey breaks out a cautious smile that just tilts up one corner of his mouth. “Oh. Can’t say I’ve ever been passively in love with someone before. What’s it like?”

Tony smirks, familiar swagger and grace finally settling in his bones like they belong. “Come to dinner with me tonight and find out, sourpatch.” He winks, and then laughs, because it’s so ridiculous to be winking at Rhodey of all people.

Rhodey laughs, too. “Okay, Tony. Sounds good.” He starts to leave, but then turns back around. He glances at Tony’s desk, where the empty frame still sits. “I can’t offer you proof,” Rhodey says, “but you do have a heart,” and then kisses him.

Tony is shocked into silence, and the feel of Rhodey’s lips against his is better than he’d ever imagined, and he’d had a lot of time to imagine. When Rhodey pulls back, Tony whines. “Let’s skip dinner. Let’s do this instead.”

Rhodey laughs, leans in to ruffle Tony’s hair. “I’ll see you tonight.” 

He watches Rhodey leave with barely disguised appreciation. He knows he’s mixing metaphors with reality, but he thinks he can finally feel his heart start to beat. He smiles, picks up the frame and connects his mind to DUM-E’s. “Hey buddy,” he sends to the bot as he tosses it across the room, “fetch.”

DUM-E, dutifully, does.

**Author's Note:**

> you made it!!! if you thought this was fun you can bother me on [tumblr](http://racetrackthehiggins.tumblr.com), I take requests, coffees and commissions


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